Forms of knowledge and the love of necessity in Bourdieu's clinical sociology

Formes de connaissance et l'amour de la nécessité dans la sociologie clinique de Bourdieu

Geoffrey Mead (1)

1 Metacohorts Consortium

The potential for sociological knowledge to assist in counteracting deleterious social forces remains a live question. In the present article I approach this question from the perspective of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and offer an explication of what can be called Bourdieu's 'clinical sociology'. This approach presents specifically personal modes of 'counteracting' those social forces that entrench themselves in the body. I begin by examining the central position, within Bourdieu's philosophical anthropology, of knowing the world as the primordial mode of engaging with it. The clinical task begins with people coming, reflexively, to know what they know. Once they appropriate this knowledge, it becomes possible either to labor on overcoming this knowledge, by a form of bodily re-learning, or to relent to the necessity of a world that they lucidly know extends beyond their capacity to amend.

Mots clés: Bourdieu Pierre; Clinical sociology; Merleau-Ponty; Sociology of love

Domaines: Sociologie

Geoffrey Mead. Forms of knowledge and the love of necessity in Bourdieu's clinical sociology. Sociological Review, 2017, ⟨10.1177/0038026116674883⟩. ⟨hal-01449033⟩